Plymouth Round

Our indoor venue at Buntingford only allows us to shoot fifteen yards, which isn’t enough for a Portsmouth. For that reason we’ve invented a round called a Plymouth (Dave’s idea.) It’s next door to a Portsmouth, fifteen yards instead of twenty, and 40 cm faces instead of 60 cm.

So ¾ of the distance and ⅔ of the target size would suggest it’s 1⅛ more difficult (¾ ÷ ⅔). However arrow diameter remains fixed and becomes more significant on smaller faces, so doing the handicap math it turns out that a Plymouth is only very slightly more difficult than a Portsmouth.

For that reason we’ve decided that we can equate a Plymouth with a Portsmouth in our records system and award handicaps and classifications indoors based on the tables for the Portsmouth. We’re ever so slightly under-classifying ourselves (by around 2 to 3 handicap points at most), but at least we can’t be accused of cheating, and can expect to score better than predicted in a real Portsmouth.

Plymouth vs. Portsmouth Score Comparison

The following tables and graphs show a comparison between predicted scores for the Portsmouth and the Plymouth, for handicaps from one hundred to zero in steps of ten. You can see that the predicted scores for a Portsmouth are (except for the very highest handicaps—an artefact of the handicap maths) slightly higher than the equivalent Plymouth.